Attending a Christmastide gathering is surely the best way for the most proper widow Mrs Lily Mereworth to complete her list and banish her past. After all, there will be more than a few suitable gentlemen present.If only a shrewd, hazel-eyed viscount didn’t keep disrupting her plans…

Newly ennobled Viscount Asher Rainham has no schedule for seduction, Christmas or dallying with women. He has merely turned up for the good company, intelligent card playing and excellent brandy. But as snow swathes the land, a certain Mrs Mereworth confounds his expectations and assaults his methodical senses.Asher, spymaster, a man who never takes risks, finds himself in need of some Rules of the Rogue…

Ghost stories on a windy night, swordplay down the Great Portrait Gallery, snapdragon in the dark – a lady and a gentleman with no thought to love… Merry Christmas.

Lily Mereworth had been under her husband’s thumb for so long that when he died she decided she wanted to be the improper lady he never allowed her to be. She makes a list of things she’d like to accomplish and as of the start of this book she’d checked off all but two of them. The two that remained were to drink absinthe and to seduce a rogue. She was inspecting the male guests at the Christmas house party she was attending to see if any of them caught her fancy enough to actually seduce. The man who seemed the most likely candidate just didn’t do anything for her. The one who did, Viscount Rainham, seemed like a man who would want more than one night – a relationship even. Lily wasn’t about to give up her independence just to have sex.

Asher Rainham is perplexed by Lily Mereworth. He can’t quite figure her out, but he likes what he sees after their rough start. The more time he spends with Lily the more he likes her and actually finds himself falling in love with her. She wants to bed him but doesn’t want a relationship. Can she take the chance of losing her independence by going forward with her seduction plans?

Let me start by saying that I enjoyed the premise of this story. I thought that Lily’s character was wonderful and I was pulling for her to become the independent woman she dreamed of being. Asher was a guy with a totally analytical mind who had little to no control over his mouth. He liked to babble facts and luckily Lily enjoyed that fact about him. I thought they were great together and was happy that they finally worked things out and got their HEA.

Unfortunately, what I didn’t like about this book was the writing. I felt like the author tried too hard to impress the reader with words. I know that sounds strange, this is a book after all, but I felt the story got lost in the over-use of a thesaurus. Or, sometimes, the non-use of the thesaurus. At one point it was written that the hero didn’t “waver or vacillate” which threw me as that just means that he doesn’t waver or waver. It’s the same thing. She also said he felt annoyance and exasperation – again, the same thing. Then there were the times when she would use awkward words and I just felt like she was trying to impress me with her vocabulary. Why use stingy, cheap, or even thrifty when you can use parsimonious? Obviously I know the definition of these words, and didn’t find the book difficult to read, but that doesn’t mean that I want them used regularly (this was just one example). They just don’t roll off the tongue – or the eyeball in this case. Making use of common words doesn’t dumb down a book, imho, but in this case utilizing ones not normally used in conversation threw me out of the book time after time. I found it frustrating, as well as highly amusing. Maybe I’m the only one who found this bothersome as there are quite a few high star reviews on this book on Goodreads, IDK. I believe this is a book that you’d have to read and decide for yourself what you think.

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Reading Challenges

Rowena's 2019 A-Z Reading Challenge: 1 /26

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Rowena's 2019 GoodReads Challenge: 1 /150

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Rowena's 2019 TBR Challenge: 1 /12

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